“TREE” is a dance of the Elements.
“MAN” is a dance of the Elements.
“SPIRIT” is the shape that dance takes.
What is a tree?
Is it the root, invisible and gigantic beneath the ground?
Is it the trunk and branches?
Is it the leaves, the fruit, the flowers?
Is it the wind that moves the leaves, evaporates and moves the water, that carries pollen and fertilises the seed?
Is it the water that continually moves in, up and out, from the root to the leaf-tip?
Is it the sun, the food that turns stone to life and leaf?
Where does a tree begin and where does it end?
What moves through it belongs to it – courses through every cell, acts on every membrane. What enters the tree becomes the tree. We are not distinct from the water in our cells, the minerals in our bones, and the same is true in the tree.
The edges of things begin to blur when we start to become as quiet and attentive as a tree. The human being grows tendrils and leaves, the tree looks back with silent eyes.
This is the beginning of Tree Spirit Healing: knowing that the boundaries between this and that are only of use if we can forget them when the need arises. Boundaries are safety nets, but they can also become poisons.
Holding polarities without being chained by them is what trees show us continually. Healing fails to happen when part of us believes that the situation we are in is immovable. Chained like a prisoner shackled to a wall who is unable to reach the water dripping through the roof, we die of thirst, we fall ill and cannot become well because, at some level, access to what is required by the body is not available or is not visible to us.
As human beings we are truly “only human beings”, with the perspective and patterning of human beings. We know less than we believe we know because we tend to cling to the facts that we have chosen to accept whilst rejecting everything else: (this is true, this is real, all that is untrue, all that is unreal). WE do not know about new things and so reject or ignore them.
“Only human beings” reminds us of our intellectual and bodily limits. However, “only human beings” means also that we must remember that in the same way as a tree is made up of stone, water, air and sun, all held in the pattern that we define as ‘tree’, we as human beings, are also part of the contigious, continual, seamless flow of energy that moves through the universe.
“Only human beings” means that we should remember not to take our own sense of importance too seriously, but, on the other hand, we should remember that we are not apart from, but instead we are a part of, creation.
If we believe that we are separate and special (more separate and more special than all other things), then we are like a tree that pulls up its own roots and refuses to be associated with water and mud and rock and wind, because it sees itself as something different from what the world has made it. When this happens, separated from what we are, we will soon begin to fade and suffer.
A tree is a tube of spirit through which the energies of the world can move.
Being in the presence of a tree and its spirit we can feel the movement of this energy again. Our edges soften, our roots spread deeper, our “but….” awareness quietens down and we become happier to let go and breath life through our own tube – the tube of our body, of our personal history, of our awareness.
No excuses – tree awareness is.
That is why the image of the Green Man is so potent. It shows the ever-awake stare of the spirit of tree nature, plant nature, that has no care for the excuses of language – those fabrications we carefully build up to give reasons to others and to ourselves why we are this and not that, why we do this and don’t do that.
We are the storytellers who have forgotten what we are. Forgotten that we can story-tell our way both in to and out of the life we live.
